When Allister Thompson was not reading, he was playing music.
"I spent most of my youth in rock bands and played with well-known North Bay musician Sean Kelly," said Thompson.
"I was in his band, Crash Kelly for several years and was his right-hand man with big glam rock hair and bell-bottom jeans so that is how I spent my off time," he recalls.
While he loved his music, Thompson has always been passionate about reading. He got his first job in publishing working part-time at a book store back in 1989.
Currently, the North Bay native is a book editor as his full-time occupation. "I spent my entire adult life in the publishing industry," he said.
"Working on other people's fictional books and over the decades I developed a curiosity that I would try it myself."
His first book was an alternate sci-fi novel called "The Music of the Spheres."
Thompson believes writing fiction is a universal skill, and what you pick up over the years is what makes a good story.
"How do you construct a plot, are there peaks and valleys of action to keep people interested, but also are your characters believable? Are your characters interesting? Do people want to root for them? All those storytelling types of things that you notice if you read a lot especially if your job is to pick apart somebody else's work."
Using all the things he has learned as a book editor, Thompson tried to think of a topic that would resonate with his readers. He believes climate change is one that many of the readers can relate to.
"It affects everything increasingly and the evidence of it is that it's caused by humans which is almost undeniable," he said.
"As an environmentally minded person which has been a backdrop of my life since I was young, I thought this would be an interesting thing to write a novel about."
Thompson's latest work "Birch and Jay," takes place in the future and follows the lives of two residents of a northern Ontario proto-utopian community who, decades after total environmental collapse, leave their home on separate quests to help save their families—and each other.
Birch and Jay are a young couple living in a small, idyllic community away from the ruins of one of Canada's great cities.
"As a newly graduated Knowledge Seeker, Jay must leave Birch and their community to collect remnants of old wisdom from the dead world. Along the way, he comes across a mysterious old woman who offers to travel with him. He will receive more than a travel companion - she offers revelations about their town's founding as well as knowledge of how to survive in a lawless world," a media release describes.
"Birch, seeking adventure, pursues Jay but finds more danger than she ever imagined. Will they find each other in the chaos and brutality of the city and get safely back home to tell the tale? Birch, seeking adventure, pursues Jay but finds more danger than she ever imagined. Will they find each other in the chaos and brutality of the city and get safely back home to tell the tale?"
Thompson also was compelled to write about an area he had been familiar with.
"The story is set from North Bay all the way down the Highway 11 corridor to Toronto," he said.
"Everything sort of fell into place after that. I think a lot of people will recognize those local settings. The novel really starts in North Bay and then the main character goes off on this odyssey."
The novel will be available in late May.